A location service for VHF tactical networks

Blue force tracking is one of the heaviest users of data services in tactical networks. The amount of traffic generated to track network nodes can be tuned, but reducing the frequency of updates reduces the quality of the stored information. In ground-based VHF tactical networks, the available bandwidth is extremely low and naïve approaches for the global exchange of location information cannot be supported in any but the smallest networks. This paper proposes an efficient cross-layer location service based on a combination of the packet aggregation, epidemic routing, and per-node prioritisation. Each node´s location information is repeatedly re-distributed throughout the network via the gossip protocol while ensuring that updates for nodes which are moving quickly are prioritised. Analysis of this service shows that this scheme achieves faster location convergence and a significant reduction in cumulative network-wide error compared with a naïve gossip approach.